At WebCollage, we are releasing a new version of our SaaS based solution to our customers every two weeks. We released 23 versions in 2011, and will be releasing the 6th version of our software over this upcoming weekend. In other words, we are firm believers in agile development and in its ability to help obtain continuous market feedback (here’s a previous post on this topic).

For various reasons, though, agile development has become somewhat synonymous with one specific approach, namely Scrum. Realizing that Scrum is widely accepted, I previously expressed an opinion that Scrum is perhaps an interesting recipe, but is far from being the best approach to SaaS agile development (and web application development in general). I have received quite a lot of feedback on that other post, some with contrarian views arguing that Scrum is perhaps a silver bullet after all.

There’s always something to be said for using the most popular approach. As an old IT saying goes, no one ever got fired for buying IBM. In this regard, there are intrinsic advantages to using Scrum, most notably the industry ecosystem: ability to easily find knowledge, share best practices, etc.

Insomuch as the actual methodology goes, though, there are simply better alternatives for many software development scenarios. Here’s a sketch of how we at WebCollage develop software, and the advantages it has over Scrum. Our approach is an adaptation of Kanban/Lean software development.